Beyond Co-Op - January 27th through February 2nd, 2013

It's movie time

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Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, the weekly piece where we look at interesting news around the gaming and entertainment industry that may not directly pertain to cooperative gaming culture. There's a lot to look at this week including a possible PlayStation 4 unveiling, and Warcraft movie.

PlayStation 4 Unveiling On February 20th?

Warcraft Movie Gets a Director

JJ Abrams revealed as Star Wars Episode VII director

Bad News Xbox Indies, XNA is No More

PlayStation 4 Unveiling on February 20th?

Well folks, it looks like its going to happen sooner rather than later, Sony sent out invitations this week to what appears to be some sort of announcement for "what's coming next." Immediately folks assume its for the PlayStation 4, which has long been rumored to be coming out later this year. If this holds true, this would be pretty big news as Sony has never announced their console on American soil first.

The PS4 is said to have a redesigned controller which features a touchpad in the center and a "share" button that'll allow gamers to upload video and screens directly from their console. The console will be powered by an 8 core, 1.6ghz processor and feature 4GB of RAM. Of course all of these specs are merely rumored and the February 20th event might just be a redesigned PlayStation Vita with a lower price.

A movie based on the Warcraft universe is on the way and is being directed by Duncan Jones, who helmed the films Moon and Source Code. Also in the news is the fact that several producers for movies like The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel will be involved and the budget of the film is said to be over 100 million dollars. Perhaps most interesting is a tweet from Jones himself which says:

So the gauntlet was thrown down ages ago: Can you make a proper MOVIE of a video game. Ive always said its possible. Got to DO it now! ;)

The movie news continues, this time about the beloved Star Wars franchise, which is now in the hands on Disney. Director JJ Abrams, famous for the Star Trek reboot and LOST will be helming the project. Not much else is known about the movie but there seems to be a solid hype machine on it already - expect a quick turnaround with the film in just 2 to 3 years.

Microsoft's XNA API was a great set of libraries for indie game developers. It allowed easy development of games by fostering access to functionality that would otherwise have taken a programmer a significant amount of time to write. Graphics, sounds, and input took only a handful of lines of code instead of entire class structures. Best of all XNA allowed aspiring devs to publish on Xbox 360 AND PC with a common codebase. Sadly Microsoft is retiring the framework, which hasn't been updated in almost two years. Whether or not the next Xbox will feature some sort of indie channel is yet to be seen, but if there is, you might have to do it via something that's more general use.